Donald Fehr is best known for having led the Major League Baseball Players Association through the strike that resulted in the cancellation of the 1994 World Series. What people forget about the 64-year-old union leader is that after that low point in baseball’s labor history, Fehr was at the helm of the MLBPA for a decade and a half of labor peace, and that tranquility has continued since he left.

Now leading the NHLPA, Fehr’s goal is not only to work out a collective bargaining agreement before Sep. 15 and avoid a lockout this fall, but to put hockey on the same mutually beneficial path for players and owners that his previous sport has come to enjoy.

Hockey already has had its labor nadir with the abandonment of the 2004-05 season due to a lockout. The goal is not to bottom out again—not this fall, not ever.

“We do believe that the proposal the players made today, once implemented, can produce a stable industry, one that, going forward, can give us a chance to move beyond the recurring labor strife that has plagued the NHL for the last two decades,” Fehr said on Tuesday in Toronto. “Players want a new CBA, and they want it soon, but obviously it has to be one that is fair and equitable to the players, as well as to the owners.”

The question now is whether the owners will go along with a plan to reshape the way the NHL does business. The specifics can be hammered out over the next month, but the basic principles put forth by the union do more to foster lasting labor peace than management's proposal.

The NHL’s idea was to cut the players’ share of hockey-related revenue from 57 percent under the current CBA to 46 percent, along with several other changes that would have been restrictive to players—the abolition of salary arbitration, a 10-year service minimum for unrestricted free agency and five-year entry-level contracts among them.

The problem with that idea is that it does nothing to address the cause of the disparity between high-value and low-value franchises. NHL revenues hit a record $3.3 billion in 2012, but growth is not even, and does not figure to become even.

The financial playing field, just from a revenue-dividing standpoint, will never be level between the Philadelphia Flyers and Nashville Predators—even if the small-market team from Tennessee did get enough money together to match the Pennsylvania titans’ $110 million offer sheet to defenseman Shea Weber this summer.

The key to competitive balance is comprehensive revenue sharing, and that is what the NHLPA proposed on Tuesday.

The union’s proposal does include a lowering of the players’ share of hockey-related revenue, at a total Fehr said would approach $800 million if the NHL continues its stellar growth of the past “couple of years, which have both been fairly strong years.” That should be music to the owners’ ears. The rest of the proposal is where Fehr’s genius kicks in.

“Under our proposal, revenue sharing could reach, and probably would reach, more than a quarter of a billion dollars per year,” Fehr said. “In essence, when you boil it all down, what we’re suggesting is that the players partner with the financially stronger owners to help stabilize the industry and assist the less financially strong ownership groups.”

Fehr said that the salary cap would still be a “hard cap,” but with “more flexibility in putting teams together.” The implication is that rich teams would be better able to flex their financial muscle, and in doing so, would help their struggling brethren through the revenue-sharing package.

For those who would argue that such a system would only open the door to domination by hockey’s biggest markets, take a look at the last five Stanley Cup champions: Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. The teams with the best regular-season records in 2011-12 were New York and Vancouver. It’s not as if the hard cap is doing much to hurt the rich clubs on the ice. On the other hand, in the five years before the cap came into hockey, the champions were New Jersey, Colorado, Detroit, New Jersey again, and Tampa Bay—teams who beat Dallas, New Jersey, Carolina, Anaheim, and Calgary in the Finals.

Fehr didn’t suggest scrapping the cap because he knew the owners would never go for it, just as he wasn’t about to go for the owners’ idea of the players simply giving back money. By changing the framework of the conversation, Fehr and the NHLPA showed that they are thinking not only about how to maximize their take-home dollars from this deal, but how they can put hockey on a path to a healthy future, building from existing strengths to take the game into a new era.